It's a new month. I have been drained physically and mentally over the last couple of weeks and because of that, I have decided that I am going to spend the month of June attempting to meditate daily. I know that sounds like a "what the hell kind of woo are you getting into now?" type thing to a lot of people, but if you had the Monkey Brain that I have, you would understand. My Monkey Brain just never stops moving from thought to thought to thought, swinging on the vines that make up my gray matter. This is really bothering me these days and Heidi, bless her heart, has been helping me to come up with things that may help shoot the curare-tipped dart in the butt of the monkey.
I realize that this is tantamount to coming onto a blog or whatever and saying "I am going to start an exercise regimen TODAY!" or "The diet starts TODAY!", only to find out that by day 5, you've stopped exercising and are having the fries for lunch again and you have to face the world with your failure. I'm prepared for that to happen. I have no idea how successful I will be. I figured that it is free to try and the worst thing that can happen is I fail and I'm certainly no stranger to that.
So you give it a shot and if what I start with doesn't work, we'll try something different. However, I'm pretty sure I won't end up in this kind of pose any time soon.
Ohm, shanti, indeed! (although looking at that picture makes me pine for that Re-Invention Tour DVD that never was!!)
I had a rather *ahem* intense discussion with my wife this afternoon. This is par for the course these days as we're talking about a lot of really deep, important stuff. Sometimes it's invigorating and inspiring. Sometimes, it's very draining and I can't do it for very long or at all. Sometimes, I don't want to talk about it because it's things I don't want to deal with. Today would have been an example of the latter.
I have been all talk and no action on changing my life for the better recently. Mostly, I've been content to just be frustrated with the things that I don't like and basically say "there's nothing to be done, it will never work so why even try?" These kinds of defeatist attitudes are not helping me AT ALL. So to those defeatist attitudes, I respectfully say "fuck you."
I'm ready to shake things up. Maybe not in huge ways just yet, but in little ways. The mere fact that I shaved my beard off in a spur of the moment decision (even though I eventually grew it back) shows that I'm ready to make little changes.
I want to do things around the house - like finish painting the kitchen, rip the old grandmother wallpaper off the wall in the downstairs bathroom and paint it something bold. I want to stain the deck chairs like I had planned to do all summer long.
I'm going to make bolder clothing choices. I wore a shirt that Heidi picked up for me at Target last week that was just slightly outside my normal realm of clothing and someone at work saw it and asked if I was having a mid-life crisis. Screw that! I hope I'm not to mid-life yet. And that just emboldens me more to shake things up.
When I was in college in 1992, I had transferred from Iowa State to the University of Iowa to go to pharmacy school. I felt very fish out of water - I had left all my friends behind and knew hardly a soul in Iowa City. I remember journaling like a fiend then - they're alternately interesting and cringeworthy, but they do chronicle what I was going through at the time quite well. And the song that kept on coming up in those journals was "Don't Rain On My Parade" - with its command to live and LIVE NOW. That mantra is even more appropriate now, at the age of 35, than it was at the age of 20.
Funny how some things just never change!!
People have been telling me stuff like this for years, but do you think I'd listen? Well, it's time to pay attention. And how can you not pay attention to Babs? She practically demands it, especially in that fur hat (which probably needs a special locker.)
Ohm, shanti, indeed!